Today is Monday, August 8, 2011. The Sun is at the Leo midpoint, which is a kind of special event; it is the Midsummer holiday, generally celebrated some time the first week of August. In Gaelic it was called Lughnasadh. It also goes by Lugnasad, Lúnasa, Luanistyn, First Harvest or Second Planting. The Catholics used to call it Lammas, for whom it was the festival of the wheat harvest (with a traditional date of Aug. 1).
It has a lot of names, for a holiday mostly remembered by witches and a couple of astrologers. It’s one of the four cross-quarter days, the midpoints of the turning of the seasons. The seasons come about 12 weeks apart, and when half of that time has gone by, we arrive at a seasonal midpoint. These tend to have modern holidays piled onto them, with the notable exception of Lughnasadh.
This is an agricultural holiday, which comes with the reminder that our study of the zodiac has its roots in understanding the seasons so that food could be dependably produced. We might take this for granted now, but it was only recently that understanding the basic movements of the Earth was a matter of survival. We owe what we know to the ancient Chaldeans, who invented the tropical zodiac (for more on that, check out this article from earlier in the year on the 13th sign hoax).
Lughnasadh has the first hint of autumn, much like Imbolc, the Midwinter holiday, has the first hint of spring. It’s true you may be ear-deep in snow when the Sun reaches the Aquarius midpoint in early February, just like it’s still pretty darned hot in much of the Northern Hemisphere at the moment, but we can easily feel how summer is at its peak and will gradually ease into fall.